Struggling with Tasmota Stability

Hardware
1

I ran Tasmota a year of so ago back in the early 6.X releases and kept having issues with devices randomly rebooting, even stuck in a loop of rebooting every few seconds. I went with ESPurna and ESPHome for the past year or so and had zero issues with stability / reboots / etc.
Here we are at the end of 2019 and I thought I’d give Tasmota another try (6.6.0) and I’m in the same boat again. I don’t know that there’s something wrong per se with Tasmota, but there has to be some behavior that is different between Tasmota and Espurna, ESPHome, etc. Does anyone know of some settings that can cause random reboots if not set correctly. I’d love to be able to provide some log excerpts but doesn’t all that get lost when the thing reboots? All I can show for sure is the bootcount is up in the hundreds.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:
A few more details folks may be interested in:
The types of devices in question are currently the Merkury 75W RGBW bulbs available from Walmart, but I’ve also experienced the same behavior with Sonoff Basics.
I do have 5 of these bulbs currently Tasmotized and only one is currently misbehaving. It is in close proximity to the WiFi AP and reports 100% RSSI.
I saw one another discussion about Tasmota reboots, to do a reset 5 and then reconfigure the device again. I have done that and so far the bulb is acting okay but its only been a few minutes.

EDIT #2
The reset 5 thing only works until the device is fully reconfigured again, then it goes back into the reboot loop. It seems to be the MQTT settings that finally kill it. These are the same MQTT settings I have on several other Tasmotized devices. The MQTT functionality does work, its just that the device ends up in a reboot loop (about 5 seconds exactly) a few minutes to a few hours after being setup. One thing I noticed while playing around with this is that the LoadAvg value was over 1000. I noticed that thehackbox.org has Tasmota 6.7.1 So I’m going to give that a try today.

2

I know lots of people had this problem when using builds of TASMOTA that used the Core v2.4 or v2.5 library. The release version of 6.6 used Core 2.3, and it has been rock solid for me. I’m not sure what 6.7 is using, but I flashed it on a test device soon after it came out, and I haven’t had any connection drops since).

3

Looks like Tasmota 6.7.0 is using dev versions of Core and SDK?

{"StatusFWR":{
  "Version":"6.7.0(sonoff)",
  "BuildDateTime":"2019-10-25T12:28:03",
  "Boot":31,
  "Core":"STAGE",
  "SDK":"2.2.2-dev(38a443e)"
}}
4

Ditto. For me, only 2.3 has been reliable enough to be usable.

5

I can confirm that this Dev core is working great for me so far, running 6.7.1 on all my sonoffs now.

6

I run 3 MagicHome RGB controllers running Tasmota.

I upgraded from 6.6.0 to 6.7.1 and had the constant reconnect issues as above.

What fixed it for me was entering “sleep 0” onto the console.

1 Like
7

That is interesting and something I’ll definitely try if 6.7.1 ends up acting weird after setting it up for MQTT.
I say that it’s interesting because when I was looking into what can cause high LoadAvg, the sleep settings is something that came up as a possible fix, though I didn’t see sleep 0 exactly.

8

6.7.1 is using pre-2.6.0 core. That is the only supported core going forward. Been using that core in dev versions for months now. Zero MQTT or WLAN dropouts. Latest dev of Tasmota is 7.0.0…

9

So far, 6.7.1 is doing the trick, but it hasn’t been long enough to know for sure. I’ve got two of these bulbs Tasmotized now on 6.7.1 with the same config that was causing me issues on 6.6.0 and so far no reboot loops, and the LoadAvg hangs around 20 for whatever that’s worth (was around 1000 before).

10

Well, I made it a few days at least.
The bulb hasn’t started doing the reboot loop thing just yet but I expect it too. The LoadAvg is up over 1000 and that’s normally what precedes it.
I’ve tried the sleep 0 on this one and it didn’t change the LoadAvg at all.
I’m running 6.7.1 on this one and all the others in my house as well, but only seem to be having issues with this one bulb. I don’t think its a hardware issue, just a specific recipe of factors. In fact the bulb that I was having trouble with when I opened this thread isn’t having any trouble any more, its a different newly-Tasmotized bulb that’s acting the same as the other one did earlier.
I know posting more details of the configuration would probably be helpful, is there a way to export the configuration parameters that have been changed from default?